Ethnic Studies Review Vo lume 33.1 Jacob Riis and Double Consciousness: The Documentary/Ethnic "I" in How the Other Half Lives Bill Hug Jacksonville State University "Contradictory" is the watchword in scholarship on Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis. "Wildly contradictory, morally schizophrenic": so Keith Gandal describes Riis' work (18). "A deeply contradictory figure [ ...] a conservative activist and a skillful entertainer who presented controversial ideas in a compelling but ultimately comforting manner": such is the assessment of Riis offered by Bonnie Yo chelson and Daniel Czitrom (xv). "The typical Victorian moralist," but also the Progressive-so To m Buk-Swienty proclaims him (239, XIII). These assertions point up perhaps the central issue in the relatively small amount of scholarly work on Riis since his rediscovery by Alexander Alland in 1947. How does one resolve the contradictions, in his photos and texts, between protest of the plight of the ethnic urban poor and acceptance of pejorative nativist assumptions about them? Until the 1980s, scholars usually did so by emphasizing the apparent haziness of Riis' thought. 130 Hug-Jacob Riis and Double Consciousness According to Roy Lubove in The Progressives and the SLums, Riis' social theorizing was "unsystematic[ ...] almost impressionistic"(49); Charles Madison, editor of the 1970 Dover edition of How the Other HaLf Lives, calls Riis' sociological thought "relatively unsophisticated and[ ...] limited"(vii). To these scholars, Riis seems oblivious to the conflicting portrayals of the poor in his works. Recent commentators have sometimes been harsher, seeing the tensions as reflections of Riis' systematic efforts to project himself as spokesperson for the emerging American middle class. Scholars such as Maren Stange, Sally Stein, and Gandal regard Riis' work as canny exercises in definition by opposition: by portraying the ethnic tenement dwellers from the smugly condescending standpoint of the American middle class, the writer affirms their status, authority, and Christian charity, and­ -most importantly--his own affi liation with them. For Maren Stange, Riis is the "consummate publicist" for the American bourgeoisie, eager to ally himself with them (5). Sally Stein is more blunt, portraying Riis as "one of a long succession of professional informers manufacturing vast amounts and kinds of information [about the urban poor] to assuage and intensify [middle class] fantasies" (10). Gandal's conception of Riis presents a variation on this theme. He describes Riis' social vision as the mixture of two opposed but complementary ethical approaches: one, the traditional Protestant commitment to moraL principle maintained through discipline (personal as well as institutional); the other, a modern, technology-and­ media-based promotion of "spectacle," the American public's emerging preoccupation with looking at others and being looked at themselves. In other words, tenement dwellers' eagerness to be seen, reflected in their frequent desire to be photographed, might well be employed to promote their own moral development. While this conception of Riis treats his contradictions in more sophisticated and perhaps more plausible ways 131 Ethnic Studies Review Vo lume 33.1 than do those of Stange or Stein, Gandal still perceives Riis in essentially the same fashion as these other scholars--as a writer eager to promote the middle class and his membership of it. If earlier commentary portrays Riis as a na;f, unaware of his own contradictions, these contemporary scholars depict him as a bourgeo;s assimilationist. While both approaches offer important information, both represent Riis in terms that are rather simple and narrow intellectually, psychologically, and, above all, rhetorically; terms that do not account adequately for the individual and his work. Perhaps the major flaw in both is the overly simple reading of the "I" who speaks for Riis throughout his works. Proponents of both conceptions assume that Riis, in all his first-person commentary on the tenement poor, is oblivious to the ambiguities in his own self-portrayal. From this perspective, Riis' narrative "I" lacks any capacity for self-detachment: his "I" speaks merely as Jacob Riis, in an ingenuous fashion free of conscious artifice, dissimulation, ambiguity, and, certainly, of irony. Whatever tensions or oppositions scholars find are explained as products of his sloppy thinking or of his panderings to the middle class. So, when this "I" speaks of himself and his polite audience as "we" in contrast to the "they" of "the other half," both sides assume that Riis allies himself consistently and whole-heartedly with his audience. Yet this premise may itself be ingenuous, for several reasons. For one thing, the documentary context from which Riis' "I" addresses us--a context which, as William Stott has noted, Other Half was instrumental in establishing (30)--operates through the conscious interplay of tensions and contradictions. Stott points out that "documentary, " as idea and as genre, melds two opposing meanings: The first, the dictionary meaning, we use when we speak of 'documentary proof' and 'legal documents, ' of 'documentary history' and 'historical documents.' 132 Hug-Jacob Riis and Double Consciousness This 'documentary' has been defined as 'presenting facts objectively and without editorializing and inserting fictional matter [ ...].' (5-6) This first type of "document" Stott terms "official." In opposition to it, though often combined with it, is the "human" document. This latter sort "is not objective," notes Stott, " but thoroughly personal," for the human document "carries and communicates feeling, the raw material of drama" (6-7). The most powerful documentaries combine the two meanings, rousing "human" feeling via "official"deta chment. Assuming that Riis understood, to at least some extent, these ambiguities implicit in the documentary genre he helped originate, he must also have realized that they could be most effectively employed in the narrative voice, the "I" whom Riis creates to carry us through the tenements of New Yo rk City and to offer commentary. 1 If this "I" is not simply the sloppily thinking Progressive or the middle class assimilationist scholars have perceived, then exactly who is he? Whom does he represent, and how he does he regard his subject and his audience? The answers to these questions require an examination of the relations between documentary and autobiography in Other Half, for the "I" who addresses us does so from both contexts, though the documentary context is the more apparent. But by embedding his autobiographical "I" within the documentary context, Riis may actually be freer to manipulate his self-portrayal than authorial personae in conventional autobiographies. All involved will agree the speaker is some species of the author himself. In taking us on guided tours of various tenement districts and offering firsthand accounts of his own tenement experiences, this narrative "I" repeatedly indicates that the pronoun refers to Jacob Riis, police reporter. If the author's conscious intention is, through his narrative voice, to meld "documentary proof" with "human" feeling, the feelings he wishes to rouse inevitably have their origins in himself-in his own 133 Ethnic Studies Review Vo lume 33.1 experiences and his thoughts and feelings about them. In other words, to understand most fully the "documentary" tensions and contradictions of the "I" who addresses us in Other Half, we must approach this speaker as an autobiographical "I," as a particular rendering of Riis himself, and consider his manipulations of self-portrayal from that angle. By the time Riis published Other Half, in 1890, he had acquired firsthand a profound understanding of ethnic relations in late 19th century America. When the young Dane had arrived, in 1870, newcomers were entering the country in numbers unprecedented-ten million between 1860 and 1890 (Jones 179). Response to these "aliens" was becoming more and more hostile; as Roy Lubove has noted, nativism in later 19th century America was "pervasive" (61 ). A nativist frenzy erupted after Chicago's Haymarket riots; Slavic strikebreakers in the Pennsylvania coalfields were shot by state militia; in New Orleans, eleven Italians accused of killing a police superintendent were lynched; New Yo rk and Pennsylvania excluded all immigrants from employment in state and local public works; Idaho prohibited private corporations from hiring any "alien" who would not declare his intention to become an American citizen (Higham 87-97, Jones 177-229). Tw enty years' immersion in this ethnic maelstrom would make Riis a savvy and sensitive commentator on the immigrant's plight. Like many newcomers, he spent his first years in America eking out a hand-to­ mouth existence, taking whatever work he could find­ carpentering, hoeing cucumbers, peddling books and flatirons. When there was no work, he starved, and found sleeping quarters wherever he could-in doorways, the police station lodging house, even a churchyard . As Riis' autobiography, The Making of an American, amply reveals, the young Dane repeatedly faced the prejudice and ill treatment so many immigrants encountered: the spoiled meat given to Riis and the other passengers in steerage on the voyage over; the policeman who uses 134 Hug-Jacob Riis and Double Consciousness his boot and nightstick to roust the sleeping Riis from a Chatham Square doorway throughout his first winter in America; another policeman